


Amusing A Muse

by Orethon



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, The Magnus Archives (Podcast), 機神咆吼デモンベイン | Kishin Houkou Demonbane
Genre: Art is a real killer, Gen, Mask, One Thousand Masks, Painting, Self-Harm, Strangulation, eye gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 15:49:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17470475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orethon/pseuds/Orethon
Summary: Hm how do you wake up 1k(1)M?





	Amusing A Muse

The sensation of seeing everything you ever wanted to be, standing right in front of you. Someone else, being every thing you wish you were. _._ The emotion you experience then would have to be called envy, wouldn't it? What about the sensation of watching that melt like a wax sculpture on a hot day, like a face in a dim mirror, distorted by the lies of peripheral vision and automatic filtering. Seeing everything you want to be, the person you wish you were, become a nightmare, without ever changing. Motionless eyes, perfectly white sclera, staring straight ahead, never flickering. Never blinking or acknowledging that they are even seeing anything. Eyes for looking pretty, not for looking. Hands resting in perfect straightness, like a 3d model that isn't rigged for motion yet. Limbs moving without muscles flexing, hair untouched by wind. A perfect picture of what you wish you were. Too perfect and too picturesque, impossible to accept as anything even remotely human. But it's still what you want to be. It's nothing human and it's everything you want to be. It demands the question - “Do I want to be human?”

Oops, I said I. Didn't intend to let on this was anything but hypothetical. Just go ahead and pretend it is. You might be safer that way, after all. That's right, it's all make believe. There's no such thing as a person that's everything to everyone and nothing at all. An ideal blank slate, sucking up the nectar of ambition and producing that nightmare honey.

The taste of envy, have you ever thought about it? It might be something like what it was to kiss... it. Them? My apologies if I seem rude, referring to them as a thing, but, to be entirely honest, people are no less things than books, and books no more not-things than people. And it certainly wasn't a human, or a person. It was a funhouse mirror, a wall of masks that only showed what I wanted to – what I couldn't bear to see. I don't think it even had a personality, just... the echoing ripples of what it ate of me.

It arrived in my life like a wish from a monkey's paw. I had wanted to be more than myself. My art, my music, my poetry – all were failures, embarrassments and disgraces. I needed a muse. Someone – something – that would inspire me to true art, that conveyed real emotion, not the maudlin fakery that I was barely scraping by with. Something that would make peoples' knees shake and their eyes water. I searched. I think I went in every store in town. I thought I had. I knew I had. But, at a yard sale I was using to preoccupy myself and procrastinate from sitting down to another draining session of painting the worthless consumerist trash I had to mass produce to sustain myself, I found it. A book, bound in rubber and with what looked like gold titling. _A Thousand Masks_ was the title, then. At other times, it had other titles. But those times were not this time. The yard sale was slow, and the owner was busy with another sale. I had to have the book, and by the look of it, it would be expensive. And I was in a hurry. So I stole it.

I'm not a criminal by nature, but I am also not a fool. I couldn't afford to buy the book, and I couldn't afford to not have it. The seller, clearly, could afford to not have it, and had not taken sufficient precautions to ensure that it wouldn't be taken. I didn't feel bad about it, because I was too busy pouring over the story. Too busy studying the layers upon layers of meaning. I felt like each page could be dissected into its own book, each recounting of a mask a religion – some were. The lengths of each section varied wildly – the longest about 10 pages, and the shortest merely the words “Without face, a mask.”

I read through the night, and only realized as the sun burnt my eyes through the window that I had been reading with no light. I had found something deep. I rejoiced, and dragged one of my last unaccounted for canvases from my storage closet and began to work. The inspirations carried me, and I licked my paint onto the canvas, bit my fingers and smeared blood into the inks, wept and laughed as I worked. The day passed, and I found my masterpiece complete. A white mask, whiter even than the burning of the sun in my eyes, set against a sable background of immense detail, a collage of faces, shapes, sinners and saints alike suffering in the darkness behind the mask. The darkness within the mask. All of humanity was represented in my blood and spit and pigment, and the empty eyes stared into me, through me, at everything and nothing at all. I felt, for the first time, truly connected to my art. I had put my soul into the piece, and it showed.

Of course, I could not bring myself to sell it. I had to produce another work, one that did not so demand that I possess it. And so, I worked through the night. The process was much the same, stark whites and bloodied blacks and the outpouring of love for the forming figures. I did not turn on my lights. I do not think I could have, or if I could have, I would not have seen. The dark is brighter than the day, more clear, without the distractions of light. As the sun rose, singing my bloodshot eyes, I gazed again upon a masterpiece. Two gloves, as white as the mask, crossed over one another, filled with unseen hands, and decanting an orgy of limbs into the background, reaching for me. Reaching into the world. I could see them moving, bending in ways the bones ought not to have allowed, but art transcends the real. True art does, anyway.

And again, I cursed myself for my attachment. I could not sell this. It was too lovely. It was me, it had to be mine. I would have started then and there on another, but I heard the knock of one of my commissioners here for a portrait sitting. I sighed, taking up my paints, and answering the door. If they were offended by my bedraggled appearance, I did not notice. They requested I turn the lights on. I declined, making something up about the expensive paints and light sensitivity. I positioned them, looking at their face. It was familiar. Not in the way it would have been had I simply seen them before, which I had not for we had corresponded by email, and arranged the initial sitting for today, but in the way I am familiar with my own art, with something shaped by my own hands. I dismissed the feeling for the time and continued. Their hands, too, crossed in their lap, ensconced in lace, were familiar, in the same nagging way.

Only their eyes were alien. They moved them too much, and I scolded them for this. They kept looking around, like there was something they wanted to see, instead of just looking forward and letting me work. They kept fidgeting, flexing their muscles unconsciously, causing ripples in their flesh. It was so inelegant, all the wasted, useless motion. As I smeared the initial layers onto the canvas with my pallet knife, I had to resist the urge to scream at them for breathing so damned much. Their chest kept moving up and down, not presenting a consistent silhouette. No wonder all my prior art suffered. Still life was not still. Tableau vivant was a sham. I asked them to close their eyes, that I could work on the details of the corners of their eyes. They complied.

I found a suitable rope, slick, thin, and strong, and made the proper knots, so it would tighten easily and stay that way. They began to ask how long until I had finished and they could open their eyes again, but never finished. Humans take a dreadfully long time to suffocate, but at least it is, done properly, more or less quiet. Even dead and still, their eyes offended me, so I removed them, and mixed them with my paint. The vitreous humors lent a pleasing texture to the pigment. I fetched a white dress my wife would have worn had she lived to marry me, and changed them into it. It seemed appropriate. I cannot say for certain why. As their freshly empty sockets stared blankly at everything and nothing, I went back to work, and I found the result perfect. The wedding dress had become the focus of the painting, with the body made nearly blank, a perfect generic human that could be anyone. I don't even recall, now, who it had been before. As I painted it, it looked more and more like my finished piece, the features softening and fading, looking a bit more like my own. The rope fell away, of its own accord, but that didn't matter. I did not expect the corpse to rise.

Imagine my shock, then, when I looked up from the completed work, practically glowing with pride, to find the chair empty. I did not panic, but I was singularly disturbed. I rushed to the door, checking to see if they had made off while my attention had been focused on my work. If they had, they were long gone. And so, I went to my room, hoping to distract myself from the worry with reading. The book was not there. My masterpieces were not there. No, they were there, but meaningless. The mask and gloves, gone, only the tableau of roiling faces and hands remaining on the canvas. But, on my bed, was perfection.

I knew then, whence had gone my commissioner, and the masterpieces. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say I felt it. A blank body, wearing the dress, gloves and mask alike, all the same shade of eye-burning white, smooth and impenetrable. No eyes peered from behind that mask. But voice issued from that bloodless mouth.

“Greetings, my virtuoso.” the voice was haunting, inhumanly beautiful and terrible, and semantic satiation set in immediately on every word it spoke, draining the meaning from the words even as I grasped them. It was my ideal, my muse given form. I fell to my knees, my lips parting, the drying paint cracking on them as my breath stopped.

“Who are you...?” I whispered, fearful to break the silence. It just laughed, and my vision blurred, the world new and fresh, never before seen. I saw my bed, but only the shapes, not the meaning. Just a bed-shaped thing. I did not know what a bed was then. I had my answer. It was just a shape. Just a person shaped thing. It was the book, no longer shaped like a book. It was my paintings, no longer confined to the canvas.

“Will you continue painting, virtuoso? Will you help me paint a new world?” I did not know the answer, but I felt it, welling from my heart and guts, past my ability to think and rationalize, and before I could try to examine it as anything but a feeling shaped thing, I was embracing the thing before me, bringing my lips against the mask. It was cold, and hard, and enveloped me. It felt as though I, too, wore a mask, perfectly fit against my face and mouth and tongue, encasing all of me in its lie. It had its answer, now.

Of course, none of this happened. It's all hypothetical. Just a story I thought I might tell to see if you understood it. But then, true art transcends reality...

 


End file.
